I didn’t want to, but I went with them out to Route 41.
At first it scared me. We seemed to be going twice as fast as you could go in the daytime. The lights were tricky. Bobby kept looking around and yelling for me to move in closer. The traffic was fast. The cars would boom by and the wind would swerve you a little. Then I began to get the hang of it and it was exciting. We whooped and yelled, and I made myself forget that I wasn’t supposed to be doing this. I’d started and I couldn’t turn back, and that’s all there was to it.
We went about ten miles down 41 to where the road turns off to Coral Beach where there’s nice cottages and cabanas. We stopped and turned off the lights and had a meeting.
“The first guy who thinks he spots a cop,” Mitch said, “he gives a yell. We scatter. And we join up back at Dave’s house. The best way to fool them is to douse your lights and wheel off into the shrubbery and drop flat and wait. They’ll try to pick you up with a spotlight. Now Bobby, you and Arn and Dave take the left side of the road and the rest of us will take the right side. Go as fast as you can. This place is full of rich jerks who need their signs ripped down. We’ll go all the way down to the hotel, and I got kerosene to set one of those royal palms going, and then we’ll high-tail out of here, all of us.”
We saddled up and took off. The driveways were far apart. We pushed over a whole row of mailboxes. Bobby and I ripped a big sign down. The nails squealed when we wrenched it out of the post. It was hard work, because you had to keep jumping on and off the scooters, and we had to go as fast as the three on the other side of the road.
When a car would come, we’d wheel into the shallow ditch and drop flat. But the thing was, the cops came without lights. And they came from the direction of the hotel. Their spotlight went on and nailed Mitch and I guess we all yelled at once. Bobby yelled to me to follow him. The cops were busy with Mitch. We turned into a driveway with our lights off. I could barely sec the white sand of the drive. The scooter wheels mushed and skidded.
What really scared me was hearing the shot. I wondered if they’d shot Mitch. I was half crying, but I didn’t want Bobby to hear me. There was a parallel sand road there, but it was harder. Bobby switched on his lights and so did I and he motioned me to ride up beside him. I did and he yelled, “This takes us all the way back to Route 41, Dave. Let’s roll.”
“Did they shoot somebody?”
“How the hell do I know?” His voice sounded thin and scared. We went down the road. It was rough. We were going too fast. I held the steering grips until my fingers ached, and it kept bouncing me right up off the scat. All I wanted to do was get home. That’s all I wanted.
Finally we came to the stop sign at Route 41. There were lights coming fast, from the right, going in the direction we wanted to go.
“Come on!” Bobby yelled. He kicked off, but I guess he tried to do it a little too fast. His back wheel skidded in the sand before it got traction on the asphalt of the main road. And he was going to cut it a little too thin anyway. It was hard to tell just how fast those lights were coming, and I started, then turned back fast, not going out onto the highway, but sort of skidding around on the sand. It was a truck, and the air horn made a great sound in the night, and all the tires screamed, and in the middle of that I heard a small sound, something you could hardly hear. The truck went by, swerving and skidding and going onto the shoulder and then coming back onto the road and stopping way down the road. I couldn’t see Bobby any place.
I put the brace down, but I didn’t do it right, and when I got off my scooter, it fell over into the grass, but I didn’t care. There were flares out, and two men were running back with flashlights, and another car was stopping. It stopped, and, where it stopped, the headlights were shining on Bobby’s red scooter, only you couldn’t tell it was a scooter. You could hardly have guessed what it had ever been. It was rolled up the way you roll a bug between your finger and thumb. The road patrol came, and they had a floodlight and that made it easier to find Bobby. He was way over in the field on the other side. Nobody paid any attention to me. It was like I wasn’t there at all. A lot of cars had stopped, and the ambulance came. You could hear it long before you could see the swinging red light on top. They didn’t have any light on Bobby then, and they had him sort of covered. The ambulance came down through the ditch and over to where everybody was, and the man in blue from the highway patrol car said to the man in white, “It’s a kid and he’s dead.”
“Got a name?”
“Yes. It’s in this notebook that was in his pocket. Want to copy it down? Robert H. Dauby. Got that? Ninety-six Acacia Lane.”
“Tough,” the man in white said. “I know his old man. Real-estate broker.”
It was like I was invisible. Like I wasn’t there at all. The truck driver was talking again. He sounded excited. “Right out of that road over there, right in front of the truck.”
The ambulance went away. People went back to their cars. They used flashlights. It was over. I went back across the road and I stood my scooter up and got it started. I went slow and I stayed near the shoulder. My eyes didn’t work right. I kept having crazy ideas, like turning toward the headlights that came toward me. But I didn’t. I went home and I put the scooter in the garage and unlocked the house and went in. It was nearly two o’clock. I didn’t turn any lights on. None of the other ones showed up. When I woke up I was in the chair in the living room, and it was early morning. The daylight made it look as though nothing had happened, but I knew it had.
I undressed and laid down on my bed but I knew I’d started thinking and I couldn’t get to sleep again. I dressed again and drank some milk, and I didn’t go to school. The morning paper came and there wasn’t anything in it about what happened. I turned on the radio and got the nine o’clock news. The man told about Bobby. He said that three boys with motor scooters had been picked up by the county police for destruction of property in the Coral Beach area. He didn’t give Mitch and Arn and Del’s names, but he said the three boys had admitted that Robert Dauby had been with them after they learned he had been killed. Police investigation had cleared the truck driver of any blame in the fatal accident. There wasn’t anything about me, about any fifth person being mixed up in it, and I guess that they hadn’t snitched. It should have made me feel better, but it didn’t.
The house was very empty. I guessed they’d get back about four in the afternoon. I knew what I could do. I could just say I didn’t know anything about it, and I could say I didn’t feel good and that’s why I didn’t go to school. Maybe nobody would ever know about it. I hadn’t seen anybody I knew out there where it happened, and nobody had paid any attention to me. I could do that and it would be all right.
It seemed like it was going to be a long day. About ten thirty I went out to the garage. The scooter was dusty. I rubbed it off. The yellow paint looked the same, it still had a good smell of leather and oil. But it wasn’t the same as before. It was like it was a different scooter. It sat there and it had a different personality. Squat and ugly and deadly. And there wasn’t any more fun in it.
It was nearly noon when I finally knew what I had to do. I didn’t want to do it. I would almost rather have died than do it, but I knew that I had to. The bad thing was not knowing exactly why I had to. I didn’t want them to worry, so I wrote the note and left it on the kitchen table where they’d see it when they came in through the back.
I wrote, “I went out on the scooter last night with four boys on their scooters. We tore up signs and things. The police caught three of us and the other one was killed by a truck. Bobby Dauby, it was. I’m going to ride downtown and tell the police I was doing it like the others. I didn’t want you to worry, because I’ll maybe still be there when you get home.” I signed it David.